It’s a warm, patient film culminating in a quietly powerful, reflective finale, though its sum is greater than its parts when the first two sections register a touch underdeveloped.

Holofcener deftly juggles the emotions of every character, parsing exactly where each is coming from, lucidly and thoughtfully elaborating her script with their specific insecurities.

If laudable for the ways in which it can find comedy in the banal, and for showing a new side of Ridley, one wishes Sometimes I Think About Dying ultimately left more of a finite impression considering its weighty, universal subject matter.

There’s not necessarily anything new in Parmet’s script, despite her care towards this character of Jem. The film lacks surprise, and in this case, is missing a level of engagement.

Kim’s Video is endlessly entertaining, embracing the energy of the films that made Redmon, a kid from Paris, Texas, who loved movies and was thankfully able to escape to New York at the right time and find Kim’s.

Chloe Domont’s feature debut Fair Play cuts deep even as it comes dangerously close to careening off the cliff of plausibility with a screenplay that dips into sophomoric.

A ruthlessly nihilistic beast of a movie, Elijah Bynum’s second feature Magazine Dreams provides a one-note powerhouse acting showcase for Majors, who ends up getting lost in the drawn-out second half as thematic points that initially sting get repeated ad nauseam and red herrings meant to shock become unnecessary side plots.

What I can’t help but miss in all this is the poetic free spirit and deep human interest that once defined most things associated with Hideaki Anno—his concerns, it seems, have shifted from individual to structural, and perhaps people just aren’t so compelling to him anymore. Higuchi’s evidently having a great deal of fun, however, and surely has more of those rubbery monsters up his sleeve. He’s doing fine.

House Party is fun enough but feels like a missed opportunity.

While compelling in individual scenes, especially as the boys navigate their increased anger at the world, Beautiful Beings ultimately whiplashes between too many ideas and subplots to create a coherent thematic through line.

While Plane is meant to be a disposable object, the marks of intelligent filmmaking will make it linger as a positive point of comparison against various irritatingly tongue-in-cheek, cartoonish action films of late.

For Forster and his leading man, the drama is a step down from previous work, an emotionally telegraphed, near-manipulative adaptation of a better book already adapted in Sweden to far greater results.

The film’s intentionally amateurish visuals are deployed on audiences with the precision of a jackhammer, all in the interest of obscurantism.

If obviously silly, it represents an obsession with cutting-edge tech, the shininess of something new, and making our lives easier, lazier, and less connected. Although this commentary is blatant, the film—with all its insanity—remains highly enjoyable: real good, real fun, real simple cinema.

Alcarràs appears simple, even slight at first, but is deceptively far-reaching; enough at least to have impressed a Berlinale jury led by M. Night Shyamalan (and including no less than Ryusuke Hamaguchi), who collectively awarded Simón the Golden Bear.

If The Pale Blue Eye dances around potentially intriguing ideas––the dehumanization of being in the military and who ultimately answers for the crimes carried out in the name of religion––it’s all window dressing for what is ultimately a murder mystery lacking momentum.

That they met in a place the Nazis had created with the purpose of eradicating life, and that they would go on to live in an extraordinary way in a world that didn’t understand them, is nothing short of a miracle. That they left behind this record of joy puts us in debt to them for as long as we shall live.

Babylon is a brash, bombastic, unwieldy comic opera conveyed with enough bad taste and directorial panache that it—refreshingly—registers as a refutation of the well-mannered prestige drama to which these kinds of nostalgic odes often conform. And while there’s a touch of wistfulness in regards to the communal power of big-screen cinema, the film is more defined by an acidic unsentimentality, both when it comes to its characters and the precarious world they inhabit.

The film plays as one extended memory—sometimes more bitter, sometimes more sweet, always a combination of both.

This movie has the greatest ratio of zone-out time to narrative comprehension I’ve ever experienced.

That’s the fun of it all: complete unpredictability.

While events tend to get a bit outlandish . . . they provide context for the aching inescapability of her incomplete relationship with her parents. Return to Seoul is not an arc so much as it is a circle.

Framing Agnes is not a film about ultimates. It doesn’t pretend to have answers to all the insightful questions it poses; instead it just brims with the thrill of discovery.

The self-referential material and multiple-threaded storylines tend to overstretch greater narrative. Yet Leonor plays with interesting blends of reality and fiction, borrowing from Filipino action influences to create a potent concoction of how inspiration might strike a writer’s creative impulses.

The built narrative struggles against the facts of its plot, unable to find rhythm in a fictionalized version of events. But none of it matters—Brown remains a remarkable figure, a complicated character to study, and impossible not to root for.

While it’s not as overtly comedic as Stevens’ Jakob’s Wife, A Wounded Fawn is funny in its own way.

Retrograde is a powerful reminder that conflict breeds conflict and enacting a plan trying to protect a certain group of people will always leave others neglected.

Aesthetically and dramatically, Tantura is a fairly straightforward piece of work, and this is appreciated. We are being presented with the facts as the filmmakers see them. Schwarz and his collaborators acknowledge Katz and the complications of his word, while also letting us hear the admissions from the soldiers themselves.